Torchwood: Exodus Code

his face blanched with worry, watching Cash, Byron and Vlad manoeuvre a stretcher with Gwen strapped to it onto the platform, where Dana attached a winch to the stretcher, then tilted Gwen to a standing position, her head flopping onto her chest. From the controls in the wheelhouse, Finn then hauled Gwen up onto the deck. Eva was waiting at the top, and made sure she landed softly, realising immediately it didn’t much matter. Whoever this woman was, she was completely out of it, comatose even.
    On the platform, Dana turned to Cash and from her tiptoes, she grabbed his head and planted a long deep kiss on his lips. ‘Behave yourself. Or when I see you, I’ll take even more of your money.’
    ‘Rhys has everything you’ll need, Dana, and you can trust him completely,’ said Jack, lifting his bags from the fishing boat.
    Rhys held out his hand and helped Dana on board the fishing boat. She lifted her bags and carried them down below.
    Vlad picked up Jack’s bags and Cash took the heavier cases – weapons, assault rifles, he’d guess, if weight was anything to go by. But, who knows? Jack’s diverse and unusual weaponry always amazed Cash and he knew better than to question its provenance.
    Within fifteen minutes of the fishing boat docking with the
Ice Maiden
, Jack was the last one remaining on the platform. Rhys remained as close to the edge of the fishing boat’s bow as he could without tipping into the sea. His rain slicker was soaked and his face was wet with tears. The gulf between him and Jack and Gwen had never seemed so wide as it did at that moment.
    ‘I wish I could come with you. I could help,’ said Rhys, his voice choked with emotion.
    ‘I know you could, Rhys, but you need to stay in Wales for Anwen’s sake. Mary isn’t up to it on her own, you know that, and if I need something done from this end I need to know I have you and Andy here to take care of it.’
    Rhys nodded. When Jack had told him about the
Ice Maiden
, its mission and its crew, and how he thought it’d be safer if Gwen was with him on the ship rather than at the house, where she’d have to be under constant watch, Rhys had reluctantly agreed. In the middle of the night, they’d hustled Gwen to a Penarth hotel, not revealing to Mary that her daughter had been found and certainly not telling her she’d tried to commit suicide.
    That morning, while they were transporting Gwen to the fishing boat they’d borrowed from one of Rhys’s mates, they’d listened to reports on the radio of four women suffering from the same madness as Gwen having taken overdoses and being found by loved ones too late to do anything but bury them.
    ‘Rhys, you have my word, she’ll come back to you whole. I promise.’ Jack smiled, slowly saluted Rhys, then climbed up the ladder to the deck of the
Ice Maiden
.
    Drenched and despairing, Rhys clutched the stern of the bouncing fishing boat all the way back to the dock, watching bleary-eyed as the ship’s engines roared to life and the
Ice Maiden
glided across the darkening horizon back out into the Atlantic.

47
    BELOW DECK THAT night the rest of the crew and its passengers – with the exception of Gwen, who remained sedated and strapped to a bunk in Dana’s cabin – sat around the table in the mess for a meal of shrimp étouffée, bottles of Jax beer from Hollis’s private stash, and, at Eva’s request, a fresh fruit salad. The food had kept them in small talk, their taste buds trumping the crew’s curiosity about their passengers. The dishes had yet to be cleared, but Cash insisted that Hollis remain at the table with them for a little longer. Finn took charge in the wheelhouse.
    ‘More drinks all round,’ said Cash, who, like Jack, was nursing the beer with which he’d begun the meal.
    Sliding his chair closer to Jack’s, Hollis said, ‘don’t mind if I do, boss.’
    ‘That was one of the best meals I’ve eaten in a long time,’ admitted Jack. The music in his head from the meal was, thankfully, soft and sultry. Since his conversation with Olivia Steele, and his understanding of what might be happening to him and the world, Jack had been doing his best to embrace his synaesthesia rather than fighting the intensity of his multiple perceptions. He had noted that, since he’d boarded the
Ice Maiden
, the synaesthesia had lessened. He’d also not seen the vision of the woman’s face since he’d left the Coopers’ house and travelled further from the geyser.
    ‘You could do